Drawing and painting winter birds @WBCL

This was a draw along with me lesson (see drawing above) which worked very well last night. I get some fairly young kids in the class and have been doing more draw/paint sessions of late. They love it and they are pretty good at it. The parents do help with the drawings as needed but the kids hold their own. We also had colored reference pictures to consult when we painted the birds. I chose cardinals and jays because they have similar shapes but dramatically different colors. we even did a bit of color mixing and added a few details like sky or branches to them.

I have a dream hands project @ WBCL

We started out with a bit of a history lesson about who Martin Luther King was and then I read part of his speech to the kids. I had made up a sample with the circle in the middle, printing I have a dream, three faces to color, and then a few of the colored hands in a circle around The edges. Some of the kids got very very detailed in their drawings and their colorings. We were fortunate to have a donation of people colored crayon to use for this project.

Drawing and Painting winter trees @ WBCL

Winter trees are always interesting to draw and paint. This is a project where I get the kids to follow along with me and then they embellish it on their own. We have many shrubs in our neighborhood that are covered with red berries in the winter time. We used a limited number of colors of paint for this and I had the kids draw the trees first then shade along the edge of the side of the tree and the branches and go back and paint them with the  lighter shade of brown add some leaves and then use the back end of the paintbrush to add the red berries.

Making jewelry takes a bit of beads and more

We have been planning this jewelry making session since late summer. It is always fun to take a lot of jewelry findings, beads, sequins, and other items and give them to the kids so they can create some wearable items. I had intended to use more of the pole tops for rings but was unable to locate them in time for the session. Instead we took buttons and one half of a pipe cleaner with some beads and created what we thought was even a better project.

Penguins and Polar bears

This was a super fun project for most of the kids and their parents. We started with large dark colored medication bottles as the basis for our penguins we drew on white foam to make the face and the tummy and cut them out and glued them on. We added beaks and eyes and all the other features some of the kids added hats scarves and a couple even have mittens.

We went on to do the polar bears for the polar bears I brought a large bag of stuffing and have the kids add that onto tubes. Some of them are very elaborate and summer quite simple.

December crafts candles and luminaries

We did two different projects this month focusing on candles. The first one we used spools tissue paper ribbons and Felt snowflake cutouts to create our own candles. We talked about how many cultures celebrate the winter holidays using candles and other kinds of lights.



We used crystal light containers to create luminaries that would be able to use battery-operated candle lights. I had the kids gluon torn pieces of tissue paper all over the outside of the plastic containers. We then took them outside and inserted the candle lights in them to test them out. Looks like real stained-glass.

Ornament making sessions get at the creativity

Our annual Christmas ornament making sessions were again a smash hit. We made a variety of ornaments both things that were very old-fashioned and very modern. Everyone had such a great time making just what they wanted to take home and put on their tree.

Thanksgiving placemats a hit

I thought it would be fun to do a painted placemat for Thanksgiving. When I asked the kids if they wanted to draw their own or just paint one they decided they'd rather have one pre-drawn and just paint it. I found a cute drawing online and ran it off on oversized paper then put out the paints and let them go wild. Looks like they did a great job and everyone is embellished differently.